Facebook adds new 'subscribe' button: Watch out Twitter

Facebook is extending the scope of its site into Twitter and Google+ territory by making it possible for Facebook members to subscribe to each other's public posts without necessarily having to be approved friends.

The option to let other Facebook members subscribe to one's public posts will go live across the site in the coming days, Facebook said on Wednesday.

This feature will apparently replicate Twitter's "follow" model and similar functionality available in Google+. This is a capability that famous users have been requesting for a while, because personal profiles have a maximum limit of 5,000 friends.

A way to get around this limitation on Facebook has been to set up a promotional Page, but for this type of user, that means managing two presences on the site.

Now, users will be able to let others subscribe to their public posts without having to add them as friends, a move that puts Facebook in much more direct competition with Twitter and adds a major new usage scenario for Facebook members.

This new Subscribe Button is the latest in a rapid-fire string of new features Facebook has added in the past month, which many industry observers believe have been prompted by the launch in limited beta of Google+ at the end of June.

This week, Facebook announced new features to simplify and automate the grouping of friends, and earlier made its privacy controls more prominent and easier to use, two improvements seen as reactions to the Google+ Circles feature.

Previously, Facebook also rolled out video chat, which it lacked when Google+ launched with its Hangouts video chat feature.

In addition to encroaching on Twitter's stomping ground, the new Facebook Subscribe Button also matches a similar functionality available in Google+ Circles.

The Subscribe Button will also let users filter out some status updates from their activity streams if they have become too "noisy" with posts that are of little interest.

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